I´ll start here to write a AAR for Russia 1941 vs. George i finished not long ago. Scenario is russia 1941 with standard settings. This AAR will cover the full 60 turns we played with all ups and downs we both had. The interesting about this AAR will be that it doesn´t end in 1942 or maybe 1943 with one side simply surrendering. This is a true fight, in my eyes the mother of all battles.

I´ll try to be detailled were it´s necessary and less detailled when it was quiet (did not happen too often...) I´ll inform about losses, production and my overall strategy and i think George will do the same for his Germans. Do not expect high speed for this AAR, but we´ll deliver some interesting stuff to read step by step.

We had already some of these battles (Ladder) where i overrolled George. BUT: He learned his lesson, so this game was one of the best and most challenging i had so far in my AT career. And i´m sure it was the bloodiest.....

And now let the party start. George, come and tell us how you started your invasion of mother Russia

As Seille already mentioned, he handed me my head on a platter in our first two ladder games of this scenario. I learned several important lessons from those defeats on effective unit composition, the importance of air superiority and maneuvering so as to gain high attack bonuses. In our first game with me as the Germans I was defeated within a year because I let too many of his front-line troops escape. How to take them out effectively, Seille showed me when he played the Germans in our second game.

And since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, that's exactly how I started out my campaign: by copying his opening move almost 100%. Although that didn't get me any points for originality, it did wipe out or cut off nearly all of his initial border armies and got me off to a good start.

The only place I deviated was on the Finnish front. After reading several AAR's where Leningrad fell very soon, I went ahead and took the first fortress, thinking I could repeat such a feat. Unfortunately, Herman's excellent guide on how to handle this properly wasn't written yet and this would become the first area of trouble for me.

The first shot shows the disposition after my opening blow at the Finnish, Northern and Center fronts. Nearly all air and artillery units have been destroyed or cut off. It turned out the Germans deal out a lot more damage than can be expected by purely looking at the number of troops in the units. The readiness penalty and low experience of the Red Army makes this possible.

I upgraded to Rifle II and Artillery II on the first turn and set my production to cover my losses and build an additional 50 PP. The plan is to upgrade to Fighter II soon, so I can keep air superiority and use my dive-bombers to support my forward troops.

Due to a technical problem (a second russia game overwrote some of my screenshots made from the game against George) i had to remove the screenshot. It showed obviously a shot from an other game.

Since George already posted all screenshots of importance for turn 1 i´ll not show more yet.

From now i´ll take my screenshots direct out of the game to make sure to show the right screens.

My production setup in turn one: After upgrading to Rifle II i ordered to produce lots of various infantry including engineers to blow up bridges. And i produced lots of political points which might be a risk, but i need them for fighter II upgrade.

My second turn consisted mostly of mopping up trapped Russian units and advancing towards the cities of Riga and Minsk. I knew the "happy times" would be over after this and the going would get increasingly tough.

One thing I set out to do from the start, was to increase the infantry component in my armored corps. Without them, the tanks are sitting ducks for dive-bombers and anti-tank guns during the enemy's turns. I was also not planning on building tank-heavy units. Seille had combated me in the past very successfully with mostly infantry units that had one or two tanks thrown in and I was planning to copy some of his tactics.

The screen shot shows my production this turn and the results of a few attacks Seille did. Nothing to be worried about.

The first was a failed attack on Leningrad by the Finns. The low combat power of the troops after their first attack, and the lack of air or artillery support, made taking Leningrad a hopeless undertaking. Little did I know that Seille was sending major reinforcements to this part of the front, while I wasn't.

The second issue was one of operational targets. As you can see in the first turn screen shot, a big part of the Romanian force was located on the road to Uman. The other half on the road to Odessa. I made the choice to direct the bulk of the Romanian army group towards Dnepropetrovsk via Uman and have the few units that passed Odessa take care of Sevastopol in the future.

In my opinion it was better to keep Seille from forming a stable front anywhere and keep pushing on. This would be a decision I would come to regret by the end of the year.

I upgraded to Fighter II and started cranking out Messerschmidts at a rate of 5 per turn. I also kept a production of 10 PP going on to pay for future fortifications I knew I would need during the winter. Instead of motorization, I started purchasing horses. In earlier games I noticed how mobile these were during winter turns.

I start to build up my defense in the center. I plan to have a few mobile units in the center and behind Kiev. Want to keep them hidden behind the front for the case german units break thru and i need them for a counterattack.

The red fog shows on both screens where i placed /will place my defense int he next two turns. Speed is the key and to delay the germans a bit to win some time. Blowing up bridges is VERY important here.

Technical information: The last two screens show the situation at the START of my turn. You can´t see new units etc. yet. We played with activated screenshots, but i lost them for the first 8 turns due to overwriting, so i have to work with ingame screenshots now. George´s pics will show my new units on the next turn.

In my third turn I take both Riga and Minsk, the first Russian production centers. In the North, the battered Finnish units are pulled back to recover, leaving the third Corps to hold off the Russians. Surely they cannot reinforce this front heavily without jeopardizing other areas.

A big chunk of AG North crosses the Dvina at Dvinsk and I decide to turn them East instead of North towards Leningrad. Seille will be busy constructing a defensive line West of Smolensk, and I need to crack is asap, if I want to have any chance of taking Moscow this year. I also decide to divert the remainder of Panzer Group 4 towards that sector as well in the coming turns.

Minsk is taken without problems, but those pesky Russian engineers have blown the Berezina bridge, which will cause me at least a turn of delay. Additional engineers arrive to restore Minsk to its former glory, and have it start adding to my production capacity.

In the South de Dniepr is reached at 3 points, but Seille already blew 2 bridges, including the one at Dnepropetrovsk, so I decide to send the weakest Romanian Panzer unit south towards the Crimea.

My production this turn sends 5 artillery and 5 fighters to the Finnish front. The experienced Finnish fighter group is transferred to AG North, since I expect the Red Air Force to show up in force soon in the Smolensk area.

Situation in North and center. Always remember: This is the situation at START of the turn. Some of these areas look naked and bad defended, but i placed some units this turn which i can´t show yet since i lost the turn end screenshots for the first turns.

Kiev looks "normal". I destroyed the bridges and sent some more troops to defend the city. I know i can´t hold, but i want some kills and i want to delay Germany.

Sevastopol looks not good. I have only a thin defense there and i was not able to destroy a single bridge. Very critical situation not only for Sevastopol. Germany can to easy advance in the east and maybe cross the Kerch straight before the winter comes... A thing i have to prevent.

I make up my screenshots in Photoshop, using the screenshots taken by AT itself.

After cutting out the interesting parts of the front and putting them together into a single image (with some 5 pixels space between them for separation) I overlay text, in my case 14px Verdana. To make the text clearly readable I add a "stroke" effect of 4 pixels with a color I pick from the text's background (a sea pixel in case the text is written on sea, a ground pixel in the overland case).

I take care not to have a single piece of text overlap both land and sea, since you'll see the effect then (i.e. you'll see the borders around each character).

---

To continue with my fourth turn, first a point I need to address where I find the engine a little bit lacking and even misleading in information: the supply overview screen.

This screen claims to be able to predict next turn's supply needs but I had to find out the hard way this overview does not take into account supplies needed by newly created units nor additional supplies needed by units low on readiness.

In my opinion, the game has all the data it needs to make those calculations but doesn't. As can be seen in the previous screenshots I suddenly was running low on supplies because my initial stockpiles where exhausted. But since the supply screen told me I still had enough to cover my needs for one more turn, I hadn't produced any.

This "feature" would continue to haunt me for a bigger part of this game, especially after large-scale assaults, where I would end up with assault units with less than 100 Readiness (and thus less than 100 AP) due to lack of supplies, limiting my operational range in subsequent turns.

I understand the game cannot predict the readiness loss due to enemy action of course, so asking the player to add a margin for that would be logical (would be nice though if this number was reported for the previous turn, so you can develop a "feel" for it), but that it cannot produce an accurate number for your own supply needs is something I'm less than happy with.

When playing I really don't feel like doing the number-crunching myself, especially not since I have this 3 GHz processor sitting idle :-)

Through proper guess-work I deduced Seille's main air base and decided to attack it with a big force. The longer I wait, the greater the numerical superiority of the Red Air Force. Attacking now should net me a nice kill ratio AND give me more experienced fighters as well, which should offset the future numerical superiority of the Red Air Force.

The first attack is a big success, the second is more costly. I did not concentrate the attacks in case my guess would find an empty airfield. Decisions, decisions... only afterwards you will know which ones were right and which were wrong.

The general sitatuation on the front clearly shows the growing number of Red Army units being raised and the lack of new German units. My production is still focussed a lot on expensive weaponry like Fighters and Artillery and less on masses of infantry.

Most Panzer units have received an 10 Inf II as reinforcements as planned in the first turn, but there are (still) a lot of them.

... I understand the game cannot predict the readiness loss due to enemy action of course, so asking the player to add a margin for that would be logical (would be nice though if this number was reported for the previous turn, so you can develop a "feel" for it), ...

In the Supply screen it actually tells you the last amount of supply that your HQ required.... at least in the latest fulll updated version.

_____________________________

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty & well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, totally worn out & proclaiming "WOW, what a ride!"

I indeed learned to take that number more serious than the predicted supply consumption, but still, why predict it, if it is never the right number (unless you don't move or build any units and all of them have 100% readiness). So in my eyes this is somehwat of a misleading feature. And if you have multiple top-level HQ's, then you still need to do the math yourself as to what your total supply consumption will probably be.

That said, once you understand this, you are less likely to make the same mistake in the future. Only I can understand newer players having difficulty here (well... I at least did )

I never work with that suppyl statistic screen. It´s simply not needed. Depending on your command chain you can simply check how much supply your main HQ requested. I let usually all supply arrive at Stavka and all other HQ´s are assigned to Stavka (until North/South connection is broken) So if i produce requested +10% i usually never run into any problems. Somer small reserves are also always nice to have (2000-3000)

On the german side are several tricks in the first turns to get some "unused" supply. The HQ in Konigsberg is such a case. Some thousand of unused supply. Suck them out of the HQ by making it top level for two turns (over OKW) . Same for the HQ in Helsinki.....

ORIGINAL: seille On the german side are several tricks in the first turns to get some "unused" supply. The HQ in Konigsberg is such a case. Some thousand of unused supply. Suck them out of the HQ by making it top level for two turns (over OKW) . Same for the HQ in Helsinki.....

Nice tip there with the sucking the HQ's.So in my eyes this is somehwat of a misleading feature.

And if you have multiple top-level HQ's, then you still need to do the math yourself as to what your total supply consumption will probably be.

So I have to add all the supply requests from my HQ's to get a round about figure of what I need in terms of supplies? I hope not. There must be an easier way. If yes please post it in the main forum as this is not the right place. Please with pics attached. Would be nice.

Enjoying the AAR great reading and great pics.

Mat

_____________________________

"It is not enough to expect a man to pay for the best, you must also give him what he pays for." Alfred Dunhill

You´ll notice my center defense with supply problems. Happened because i used the strategy i explained in one of the last postings. That HQ was still attached to Minsk HQ which had bigger amounts of supply stored. Unfortunately the HQ was destroyed in the last turn. So this HQ did not get enough supply. No negative effects overall. Connected it again to Stavka.